Record Traffic to Folksy

The Good News!

We’ve seen record breaking traffic and sales over the past month, we’ve seen a 57% increase in visits and over 6.5 million page views in the last month compared to Sept – Oct. User sign ups in November were up 65% on Oct and items ordered were up 59% in Nov compared with Oct. December typically outstrips November too.

The Not-so-good News…

The site is under enormous pressure due to the high volume of seasonal traffic we’re getting – it’s much more than we predicted, which is fantastic but unfortunately it can lead to the site feeling slower at times, making searching frustrating. We’ve been performing a lot of background tasks to optimise the site, especially at peak times, oiling the cogs and replacing the odd sprocket. Still, with over one million items in the database the load at peak times is slowing down the site.

One thing we’ve implemented tonight is something that will hold back newly listed items from being shown on the index pages for up to thirty minutes after being listed. This helps us to cache the pages effectively and reduce the load on the servers. In layman’s terms it means you won’t see any new items you list on the index pages (e.g. category pages) for up to thirty minutes. This will only happen at peak times of the day, from 5pm until 11pm. At other times newly listed items will appear straight away. By doing this visitors to the site will be able to browse and buy quickly. This small delay will make a big difference to the responsiveness of the site, so we hope you can all understand why we feel that this small compromise to service for sellers will be worth it for the sake of impressing our visitors.

Longer term fixes to the underlying database will be deployed after Christmas so that going forward the cogs won’t need oiling as regularly and the sprockets will require fewer services.

Please look to our status blog, www.status.folksy.com which is updated by the technical team in the event of both scheduled maintenance and any technical faults and interruptions to service at Folksy.com

Thanks for reading and thank you to all of our members for your continued support,
x The Folksy Team :)

it’s a real dilemma isn’t it – great that traffic is up (which I’d noticed) but a pain that listing/editing is slow again (which I’d also noticed!) Keep up the good work, and thanks for keeping us updated Hilary.